Commercial Integrator is five years old this year, and for every year we’ve been running, CI editor Tom LeBlanc has saved the covers of each magazine on his office wall.
Something we’ve noticed from those covers, which usually feature an integration company leader, is that the people on the cover all look pretty similar. They are often men, often middle-aged, and all too often they’re white.
In honor of Martin Luther King Jr. Day this week, we wanted to find the diversity that has been lacking on those covers — and really, in the industry — but it’s been difficult to find too many minority-run integration firms.
One reason for this is that firms like New Jersey-based DasNet, run by David Salley, don’t want to be known as minority firms. That’s why Salley has shied away from interviews in the past, not wanting to make race the story.
Salley did, however, speak to CI editor-at-large Craig MacCormack about his road into the industry, the work DasNet has accomplished, and what it’s like for an African American to thrive in a diversity-lacking field such as commercial integration.
Read the article here, or hear more from LeBlanc below.
